‘Our world is quite self-validating at the moment, and not always for the right reasons.’
We spoke to Phoebe Stuckes about her debut novel, Dead Animals, out today.
Interview | Can Sun’s Playful yet Profound Sculptural Universe
‘I hope my works, whether they are playful or cruel, can more or less point towards the ultimate proposition — absurdity.’
We spoke to Can Sun about his forthcoming show, Brusies, at Mandy Zhang Art.
Interview | An Interview with Megan McDowell
‘At the time that I was reading it and falling in love with it, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I want to be a translator.” But that book started my love affair with translated literature as a reader.’
Terry Craven talks to Megan McDowell, one of the judge’s for this year’s Desperate Literature Short Story Prize.
Interview | The Radical Fabrics of Marcellina Akpojotor
‘For me, it’s a beautiful experience to be able to feel the materials with my hands while working.’
We spoke to Marcellina Akpojotor about her forthcoming show, Joy of more Worlds, at Rele Gallery.
Fiction | A Brief History of Dogs in Barcelona by Kieran Wyatt
‘I noticed she had listed three options. To hurt her. To get her attention. To make a point. I remembered learning about the rule of three at school, and I realised that it was probably a universal thing – or maybe she only used three examples when she spoke English.’
New fiction by Kieran Wyatt.
Fiction | Sump by Sheila Armstrong
‘When you are unhappy wherever you go, the common denominator is you, Teddy’s ex-girlfriend told him, with a cruelty so uncharacteristic as to be true.’
New fiction by Sheila Armstrong.
Review | The Truth about My Mother by Lucy Thynne
‘In A Woman’s Story, Ernaux more than fills de Beauvoir’s feminist and existentialist shoes. And as the family’s ‘archivist’, she is every bit the dutiful daughter.’
Lucy Thynne on Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story.
Review | Rachael Allen’s God Complex by Elliot C. Mason
‘The demands of the male observer are hidden, his words never breaking through from the silent ubiquity of their god complex.’
Elliot C. Mason reviews Rachael Allen’s God Complex.
Essay | Giving Up by Christiana Spens
‘All at once, it felt nihilistic and misguided. I had been on this extended fast, but it was devoted to absent men and not any real god. As such, there had been no revelation or resolution, no peace.’
Christiana Spens on Lent.
Essay | Frock Consciousness by Katie Tobin
‘So what is the power of literary fashion, then? For me it lies in its virtuality, that imaginary quality of the ekphrastic, something so beautiful that it cannot exist in real life as we know it on the page. That virtuality also ties into the codification of clothing, and how it might suggest something about its wearer without saying as much.’
Katie Tobin on the Bloomsbury Group and fashion.
Review | Care, Spit, and Queer Confessional: 52 Monologues by Jennifer Jasmine White
‘When we confess, we spit something out, something previously secret and slippery, something summoned up from deep inside.’
Jennifer Jasmine White reviews 52 Monologues at the Soho Theatre.
Fiction | Some Woman Doing Crazy Dancing by Jane Messer
‘She was so very, very fortunate, yes, she was.’
New fiction by Jane Messer.
Fiction | Volunteers by Laura Shaine Cunningham
‘For several long minutes, nothing changed. We seemed to be opposite and equal forces.’
New fiction by Laura Shaine Cunningham.
Fiction | Strange Day in Berlin by Gráinne O’Hare
‘I knew that the building had been turned into a block of luxury condos and bore no internal resemblance to the halls my favourite writers would have walked; and I knew it hardly mattered either way, that I could have curled up in Sylvia Plath’s unwashed sheets and it wouldn’t make me a better writer.’
New fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
Review | In the Countryside Everyone Knows Your Business by Guy Stagg
‘Seen from the other side of the Irish Sea, this looks like a courageous act, and one to wish for more often in English fiction.’
Guy Stagg reviews Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses.
Interview | Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year shortlistee Michael Magee on writing class, masculinity, and his debut, Close to Home
‘I had to find my own distance from the material I was writing, particularly because it was so close to my own experience. In the early stages of composition, I was almost bogged down by it. I didn’t know how to step back.’
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year shortlistee Michael Magee on his debut novel, Close to Home.
Fiction | Nothing Like the Old Masters by Jimin Kang
‘I have been searching for the word to describe the feeling of wanting big things, a hunger that grows and surpasses what I have inherited.’
New fiction by Jimin Kang.
Essay | The Song of Decline: Aspects of Contemporary Latvian Poetry by Ivars Šteinbergs
‘In other words, there is a love that waits, and it has been and is being published in Latvia – as well as elsewhere – right now, before our eyes.’
Ivars Šteinbergs on Latvian poetry.
Fiction | Of Milky Kindness
‘Then I told him he looked like a lop-sided Trent Reznor and didn’t he want to kiss me? This is a kind of flirting. This has never not worked.’
Fiction by Sarah Fletcher.
Reviews | The Lasting Legacy of Bert Hardy’s War Photographs
‘Whilst his subjects range widely, Hardy’s style is constant. Even in the theatre of war, he managed to keep his frame still.’
Henry Roberts reviews Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Essay | What Would the Romantics Say? by Lee Hatsumi Mayer
‘If the meaning of a poem is obvious without breaking scrolling pace, then a core aspect of the form has been lost.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer on the Romantic poets today.
Fiction | Falling by Hadley Franklin
‘She was going to have a large life, an important life. She could feel it.’
Fiction by Hadley Franklin, winner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2023.
Interview | Thomas Gardner on Running, Writing, and the Art of Discovery
‘Then as I was writing I was drawing this Exodus-like pillar of cloud, this memory of my brother, out of the dreamscape, out of the fog of the morning.’
Thomas Gardner on the new Daunt Books Publishing edition of his collection, Poverty Creek Journal.
Interview | Charlotte Hopkins Hall: Forever Entangled in a Causal Loop
‘As an artist, I’m an observer. My role is to alert and call to attention, not write policy. My sensibility is such that I experience the world intensely and recreate it in a visual form. But to try and answer this impossible question, one of such complexity, rooted in history and human avarice, a plan of correction would take time, which we don’t have, and a concerted effort, which we don’t have.’
Charlotte Hopkins Hall on her forthcoming show at Gallery 46.